


love on a deposit of frozen pleistocene carbon

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Comedy, Hypothermia, Illness, Love in a cold climate, M/M, holtby/burky if you squint, multiple mentions of anthrax, scientists - Freeform, self-surgery, terrible misappropriation of arctic research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-03 00:12:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10955646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Sasha is the only person to have lasted more than a year at Wrest Island Arctic Research Station, except, of course, for Dr. Bäckström.Or: Sasha's head over heels, in a slightly more than figurative sense.





	love on a deposit of frozen pleistocene carbon

**Author's Note:**

> This fic emerged in two days for no reason. Please click to the end notes for content warnings. I don't even know. 
> 
> As far as I'm aware this is a highly fictionalised version of what life is like in the arctic circle, so if you are a polar scientist, I'm an anthropologist and I'm sorry.
> 
> If you'd like a soundtrack, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p24yxl4m2qo) pairs well.

-

Sasha blows hard into his gloves the second he’s back inside the station. Mostly, his fingers feel fine, except for the very tips, which are completely numb, and will hopefully begin to burn with the fury of abused capillaries within a few seconds. It’s barely below zero outside, and it’s possible he got a little carried away and stayed still for too long in the hide, watching the calves from the newest generation of released caribou pick delicately at the lichen with their fuzzy little mouths.

Sasha is a scientist. Fuzzy mouths are, scientifically speaking, the best.

“You’re late,” Nicke says, when Sasha moves into the warm-up room to take off his clothes and put on his indoor set. Nicke is leaning against the door like the enormous Swedish killjoy he is, holding out his watch. “What did I say, Sasha? Tell me in my own words.”

“You said “Sasha, if you insist on staying completely still and watching your horrifying plague-ridden monster babies for hours at a time while buried in the frost, you have to come inside before your fingers freeze.””

“And what have you done?”

“Let my fingers freeze,” Sasha admits, holding out his hands, which are chalky white and starting to burn.

Nicke stares pointedly at Sasha with his huge green eyes, his faint, pale eyebrows raised. “Come on,” he says, affecting a fair attempt at arch disinterest. “I have the bath heated.”

“You’re too good to me,” Sasha tells him, when Nicke takes him by the hands, his own overlong surgeon’s fingers like brands under Sasha’s screaming nerves and examines him, pressing his thumbs into the sides of Sasha’s knuckles.

“One day you’ll give me a heart attack,” Nicke counters, drawing Sasha towards his domain, the medical bay carefully cluttered with supplies against the long months of winter isolation, organised according to whatever arcane system Nicke has in place that his successor will likely have to spend months adjusting to, if Nicke ever gives up his post.

“You’d be bored without me,” Sasha points out, wishing Nicke hadn’t let go of his hands. “It’s good to get your heart rate up. You’re a doctor, you should know.”

“Stress turns you grey,” Nicke observes, without commenting on Sasha’s years-premature thatch of iron-coloured hair. Without warning, he grabs Sasha’s wrists and plunges his hands into the warm basin sitting innocuously on one of his workbenches.

Sasha’s retort is lost to his choked-off scream. “Asshole.”

“That’s Doctor Asshole to you,” Nicke says, flicking open a crossword puzzle and settling in to supervise. “Be good and I’ll make you coffee.”

“Do you want to hear about the—"

“Not even slightly,” Nicke tells him, filling something carefully in with a green pen.

Sasha tells him anyway, watching as Nicke fights not to give him the satisfaction of a smile.

-

Sasha has grown to love Wednesdays because Nicke hates them so damn much.

“Time to get up!” Sasha yells cheerfully, banging on everyone’s door, except the four park rangers, who have the module further down the complex, and therefore aren’t responsible for weekly cleaning. “Even you, Doctor Asshole!”

Nicke is Sasha’s neighbour, and as such Sasha has been treated to years of Dr. Bäckström’s broad back and solid chest on his way to the shower in what passes for polar evening, and gets the deep pleasure of waking him up an hour early once a week and seeing his furious blonde bedhead.

“Fuck off, you ox-fondler,” Nicke mutters, sticking his head out the door. “Why are you so cheerful? You’re an hour early.”

“I’m always an hour early. I love cleaning,” Sasha lies. “Come on. Coffee in it for you if you do the bathrooms with me.”

Nicke says something that sounds vile in his indistinct Swedish and drags on the t-shirt Sasha loves the most over his entirely bare chest. It says _Swedes Do It In Pieces_ in English, and has a suggestive picture of one of those little Ikea wrenches on it. Sasha knows from intimate experience that it is almost thin enough to show his nipples.

“One day I’ll leave your corpse in your science cave and tell everyone you caught defrosted Anthrax and decided to go to the wilderness to die like the shaved bear you really are,” Nicke says, bumping his forehead into Sasha’s for a second, his eyes still half-mast with sleep. “Let’s get it over with.”

Before Nicke arrived at Wrest Island Arctic Research Station Sasha treated Wednesdays as cosmic payment for having the privilege of research funding. Every hand takes their share of cleaning, just like they all unload the resupply ships and take their turns doing maintenance. It’s too small a place to employ anyone to do it, and besides, having back-to-front knowledge of how the place functions as an organism all its own in case of emergency is part of increasing their chances of survival in the face of disaster. Sasha makes sure the newcomers always know where everything is within their first week, just in case. It had been his job to onboard Nicke too, just a scant eleven months after his own arrival, and since then, Wednesdays have become his favourite day of the week.

Sasha leans his forehead back into Nicke’s, reaching up and smoothing down his knotted hair. “I also have dried blueberries.”

Nicke groans and heads off down the hall, long legs eating up the segmented steel with casual ease. Sasha should probably be less obvious about how much he loves to watch him move, but if pressed he can always claim operant conditioning; Sasha spends a lot of time discussing apex predation, and has a certain worldview that could, tenuously, be linked back to a fascination with watching lions eat zebra on the nature channels when he was a kid. It’s not his fault Nicke moves like he’s ready to kill something.

Sasha follows him, waving a cheerful good morning to all the sleepy faces emerging into the hall to split off to their assignments. By the time he’s on his knees in the bathroom scrubbing the floor of the showers while Nicke scrapes out a little patch of rust around one of the taps, Sasha is in a roaring good mood.

It’s edging into spring, and that means an upswing in activity for him, trips across the island as far as he wants to go, nights out in the open. It also means taking Kuznetsov and Zhemchyna along with him, and this is Zhemchyna’s last two months before the ships arrive in July to take her back to St. Petersburg.

He’ll miss her; she hasn’t asked a single question about his personal life, and has proved very adept at snowmobiling away from polar bears, which is an essential skill during the winter, when they’re hungry. She also hasn’t gone insane, another point in her favour. Sasha is going to have to train a new postdoctoral fellow, and he’s not looking forward to trying to fill her shoes.

“Nicke, will you remember to submit your requisitions this week?” Sasha asks, enjoying the way the grime is coming off in patches.

“Go to hell,” Nicke says, flicking water at him.

Sasha dumps the cooling bucket on his feet, and in the ensuing chaos of Nicke yelping and making a solid effort to kick him, Sasha sideswipes him and drags him down on top of him, weight of his body pinning Sasha effectively to the floor. “Requisitions, Nicky,” Sasha wheezes.

“I’m the only one who ever does them on time,” Nicke points out, before he kisses him.

They make it back to their bunks in time to change for breakfast, just like always.

-

Sasha’s twice-yearly check-up is probably the least dignified experience of living on a small polar station, up to and including collecting fresh bear faeces, running from said bears in order to examine it, or collecting tissue samples from the corpses they find every May.

He supposes if he were to complain about it, Nicke would just tell him that’s what he gets for sleeping with his doctor.

“How are you sleeping?” Nicke asks, slouched mostly on the swivel chair that makes him look like a fey giant in juxtaposition to its utter ordinariness. “Still having the dreams?”

“I never told you about the dreams,” Sasha says.

“You kneed me in the kidney three days ago and woke up yelling about foxes.”

“They’re an indicator species,” Sasha mutters, remembering falling asleep in Nicke’s too-narrow bunk and Nicke being so good as not to kick him out like he usually does.

“I’m going to put “no change” on your record,” Nicke says, doing exactly that.

“You know, it’s really not sexy when you feel my balls with a rubber glove on,” Sasha informs him, when they get to the more naked portion of the hour.

“Or you’re just not very kinky.” Nicke snaps the latex-free band against his fine-boned wrist. “Take your shirt off, I need to listen to your heart.”

“I bet you say that to all the scientists,” Sasha gripes, momentarily tangled in his shirt collar.

“I do,” Nicke says serenely. “Be grateful you’re not over fifty, and I can take you at your word that you’re urinating normally.”

Sasha escapes with a clean bill of health and with Nicke’s lips pressed to the top of his head, his long fingers warm against the nape of his neck. “Get out of here,” he says into Sasha’s hair. “Go bother your post-docs. Send me Kuznetsov.”

“Sadist,” Sasha says, admiringly. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

-

Summer is the only time of the year the island is reliably accessible by ship, so they get in huge banks of supplies. For Sasha that means samples and the occasional live animal, and for Nicke that means a year’s worth of stockpile for emergencies, but it also means babies.

This year it’s two marine biologists and, under Sasha’s nominal supervision for postdoctoral work, an ornithologist, ready and willing to get his hands dirty in the bird colonies.

They’re replacing Zhemchyna, Brouwer, Copely and Laich. Sasha, as the senior in charge of all research postings, will have to make the time to get them up to speed with life onshore, and make sure they know the ins and outs before the ice comes back.

It’s always great to have fresh eyes on data, but for all he can’t wait, in particular, to sit down with Burakovsky and hear all his thoughts about Myrtle Sandpipers and their significance to the nesting behaviours of co-occupant species, it’s always a little bit daunting to take in new bodies and say goodbye to the old.

The night before the departures, there’s always a party.

Sasha, as the only researcher ever to manage more than four years on Wrest Island, now plans his speech ahead of time, writing it down on little flashcards. “How does this sound?” He rolls over in bed, crashing into Nicke like a rogue iceberg. “Ever since you assholes arrived up here like newborn musk-oxen ready and eager to have strange and unexpected consequences for our fragile social ecosystem—”

“I think you sound like an anthropologist.”

“Don’t insult me,” Sasha says, hooking an elbow across Nicke’s chest to better prop his cards up. “Anthropologists couldn’t hack it up here.”

“There are no people up here,” Nicke points out.

“We’re people.”

“I’m not sure it counts,” Nicke says, throwing a leg over Sasha’s thighs.

Sasha clears his throat and continues. “—the park rangers have been waiting for you to set a foot out of line so they could toss you off the northside cliffs. I’m pleased to see you all made it to the end of your year with us, despite the cold, the boredom and most of all the bears trying to kill you. Safe travels, don’t get lost and end up in Alaska, because we don’t have airspace access and can’t rescue you if you do. Goodbye!”

“Poetic,” Nicke says flatly. “Inspiring.”

“Just you wait, I’ll have a good one for when you go.”

Nicke says nothing to that, slipping a hand under the waistband of Sasha’s flannel pyjamas and rubbing small circles into his hip.

Sasha knows better than to bring it up again; the only person who’s lasted nearly as long as Sasha through the long, harsh, howlingly isolated winters is Nicke himself. Sasha thinks maybe if he wasn’t around, Sasha would have gone back to Moscow by now, taken up a position as chair of the rewilding project instead of its head in the field, and settled in for a solid career in teaching. Maybe he’d have come back out to the far north every couple of years to check on the progress of the reintroduced fauna, but he’d be lying to himself if he said Nicke isn’t in large part what makes it bearable, when winter closes in.

-

“Okay, new kids!” Sasha exclaims, gathering all twelve members of the expedition together on July fifth, when the last ship has left and with it Sasha’s last postdoctoral fellow, three puffins, two musk oxen and several crates worth of Sasha’s research materials, up to and including a pair of preserved caribou carcasses. This is the first time they’re all sitting down together as a team, and Sasha likes very much to make a point of it. “I am Dr. Ovechkin. This is Dr. Bäckström. Dr. Bäckström is in charge of fixing you if you get mauled, and I am in charge of making sure you don’t get mauled. You’ve done your pre-arrival training so I don’t need to tell you not to go outside barefoot, but I can tell you right now you have no idea how you’ll deal with winter until winter happens. There’s some good news, though! We have eight weeks of glorious summer to get ready, so welcome to Wrest. The bears are not friendly, but we are.”

“Do we applaud?”

Sasha thinks the one with his hand up is Wilson, one of the marine biologists. Sasha remembers his approval papers. He looks like a hockey player, and his Russian is horrible.

“No. Next question.”

Burakovsky, the ornithologist, pipes up. “Why is there always a line for the muffle stove?”

“Why are you trying to use the muffle stove?” Kuznetsov asks, turning incredulously to Sasha. “He’s not doing core samples with me, is he?”

“What happens if Dr. Bäckström gets mauled?” Asks Latta, also in terrible Russian. God save Sasha from Canadians.

“Dr. Bäckström stays away from the bears,” Sasha says mournfully. “He doesn’t believe me that they’re fascinating, and that they can be observed—“

“If you find any carcasses in the frost, you come and get me and you do not touch them,” Nicke says from behind Sasha’s left shoulder. “Or we’ll see who gets mauled.”

There’s a wave of collective nodding among the gathered faculty. Sasha glances over at Nicke, taking in the tiny smirk peeling at the corner of his lips. “Shall we tell them what happened to the palaeontologists?”

“What happened to them?” Burakovsky again. Sasha is delighted to hear another accent like Nicke’s for once; he likes the musical swing it gives to Russian. He’s going to enjoy making him say random words when they’re trapped inside by the blizzards and starting to exhaust even cards against humanity as a way to stay sane.

“Nothing,” Nicke says, ruining it. “Which is the best possible outcome.”

“That’s boring,” Latta mutters, in English. Wilson elbows him violently. “What? It is!”

“Get used to boring,” Nicke says, also in English. “Boring might save your life one day.”

Latta blanches, his square face going comically blank. Burakovsky laughs, sticking his hand up. Sasha is alarmed to note that his arm is extremely long, as is the rest of him. “What do you do for fun?”

“Sasha’s an alcoholic,” Nicke lies, “and I’ve got a collection of tears.”

There’s dead silence among the newcomers, before T.J., Kuznetsov’s carbon-saturation counterpart, ruins it by laughing so hard his protein bar ends up in crumbs all over their tiny, checker-topped kitchen table. “Oh man, their faces!” He slaps one big thigh and grins so broadly his entire mouthful of white teeth is on display. “Dr. Nicky will cheat you at cards, and you’ll learn to like it.”

Nicke huffs. “I don’t have to cheat, you’re just bad at poker.”

Sasha claps his hands once. The first time he did it, after taking the project lead, he felt like a schoolteacher, or a sports coach for little kids, but it’s surprisingly effective. “Emergency drills are once a month, or whenever I feel like it. If the rangers—“ he nods at the two of them who are on the base today, Holtby (plus his beard) and Schmidt— “tell you to do something, you do it. They’re in charge of the preservation area and we are not. Got it? Try not to fuck each other, and don’t tell me about it if you do.”

Nicke pokes him clinically between two of his thoracic vertebrae, pain of it radiating out in slow waves from Nicke’s thin fingertip through the layers of sweaters Sasha is wearing. “Dr. Bäckström has condoms.”

-

Wilson, Latta and Burakovsky settle into the rhythm of life pretty quickly, all things considered.

“They’re fine,” Holtby and Orlov assure him, during Sasha’s weekly meeting with the rangers to make sure there’s no bad blood brewing between the two sets of residents. Sasha is well aware that scientists have tendencies to tunnel vision, and while he himself is no stranger to distraction to the exclusion of, say, keeping track of his own relative state of hypothermia, he’s also had several years to learn how not to be an asshole to the people who are not that way inclined.

Schmidt and Alzner nod agreeably. “Andre’s trying to teach everybody Swedish.”

“God help us,” Sasha says, pushing the tin of biscuits he keeps for these meetings across Holtby’s desk. “I’ve been trying to learn it for years, and all I can say is “does your mother know you like that.””

“We don’t need to know more about your sex life than we already do,” Holtby tells him, taking a chocolate moon.

“I resent that.”

“We resent how loud you two are on Sundays, so let’s just agree that everyone still thinks it’s a secret, shall we?” Holtby crunches his biscuit in half without spilling any of it in his beard, a kind of native precision that Sasha admires in such a hirsute man. “What’s your off-site schedule this month?”

The four of them gather around as Sasha drags out his maps. In truth, he’s looking forward to spending as much time as he can outside, storing up the memory of fresh air for the winter, when he’ll spend as much as weeks at a time doing his best to keep everyone from going spare with very little left over for himself. He tells Holtby where he left every observation point, and Holtby tells him what their schedule is for confirming how any existing structures have survived the ice, and Sasha makes a plan to send Burakovsky down to the north shore with Holtby in two days.

The exhilaration of summer has never faded, not in the years he’s spent here and not now, when the sun is long in the sky and the air is a balmy five degrees. “Need anything more from us?” Sasha asks, surreptitiously making a grab for the last chocolate moon.

Holtby takes it out of his fingers and eats it whole. “Nope. Thanks. Happy Saturday.”

Schmidt snickers and grabs three jam shortbreads. “Tell Dr. Nicky we said hi.”

Sasha should worry how much everyone knows about his intimate schedule, but on the grand scale of life here, it’s not only inevitable, it’s probably better. It’s the kind of thing that could ruin him professionally, but up here the only rules are the ones they make for themselves, and the only people they have to rely on are each other. Sasha will put up with any amount of teasing for that, and he knows not a single soul who has chosen willingly to live at one of the highest inhabitable points in the world would ever betray that implicit pact.

Besides, Sasha has seen the way Nicke has quietly repaired gashes, treated headaches and deprivation and frostbite and any number of ailments whose root is more psychosomatic than physical. He thinks anyone would be mad to ever begrudge him his own sanity, even if they’ve all been surprised to discover he’s a screamer.

-

When Sasha has been on Wrest for eleven months, he thinks about leaving.

It has been a long year, and Sasha has spent most of it watching the reintroduced populations that started his entire project be decimated by predation, by disease and by the sheer violence of the weather. The steel-and-fibreglass prefab modules making up the station are starting to echo like a spaceship, every clank and groan of them resisting the wind outside and the metres-high drifts of snow occluding the small, reinforced windows give the whole thing an air of precarious unreality, a dangerous state of mind for someone who requires tangibles to stay grounded.

By the time the supply ships get through the melting ice, Sasha is marking days off on his calendar, even though he still has time to say yes to the offer that’s on the table: stay another year, extend his stay and try to pilot a study so broad in scope he thinks it might be mad. There’s no way to think that maybe it will work, this possible recreation of balance in just one, small part of the chaotic earth, a late-pleistocene rewilding that might give humanity as a species an insight into what it might take to care for the Arctic the way it used to care for itself. He wouldn’t be the only one, but he’d be the one up here again, for another year, for another winter, for another seven months of darkness and cold and the eerie shine of the borealis governing the short amounts of time he’ll be able to spend outside. Another winter watching the bears, and watching the unpredictable ice.

Sasha is calculating how long it would take to send another qualified replacement for him, and how long it would take to determine whether that mysterious person would have the necessary insane passion that Sasha arrived with to carry the project for another year in his absence when the first changeovers happen, and suddenly Dr. Ochenko is gone, heading back to Kiev with visible relief, and in his place is a twenty-six year old Swedish prodigy disguised as an MD-PhD named Lars Nicklas Bäckström, striding down the jetty with one bag over his big, rounded shoulders and a determined set to his finely drawn mouth.

Sasha isn’t enough of an idiot to claim love at first sight, but he can certainly admit to the things he appreciates, and has in fact made a lifelong point to drive forward with enthusiasm, because otherwise, what point is there in continuing to work for something that may be futile?

The first thing Bäckström ever says to him is: “if you were hoping for a dentist I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

Sasha grins even wider, never happier to have lost a tooth to an ox calf in a half-sedated panic. “I think it gives me character.”

Bäckström strokes a spindly hand back through his wind-tangled fall of hair and looks over Sasha’s shoulders towards the modules. “You’re Ovechkin?”

“I am.”

“I hope you’re good at tissue collection,” Bäckström says. “I’m looking for anthrax.”

“I hope you don’t get lucky,” Sasha says, taking his bag. “Call me Sasha.”

When Bäckström cracks a smile and says: “Nicke, if you need a nickname. Don’t call me Kolya.” Sasha decides extending his contract might not be a suicidal idea after all.

-

In mid-August, Sasha comes in from his blissful outdoor Sunday morning run around the compound to screaming chaos.

Kuznetsov is spitting curses at Wilson and Latta, who have become a kind of strange double-act by dint of being marine biologists, who are inherently weird, and they are mostly joined at the hip. Possibly being some of the only native English speakers does that, and Sasha is relieved once again that he can happily speak Russian and doesn’t have to worry about making himself professionally and personally understood in a language so alien to his upbringing. He respects the effort of learning, but can also recognise that he’s definitely lucky he can put fluent English on his CV as a professional qualification but can get away with not using it. Thank god for government funding.

That being said, it looks like some translation is in order, because Kuzy is yelling about sample disruption and Wilson is yelling about how Kuznetsov just pulls data off the clean-air isolation tower and sends it back to Omsk and should get his head out of his ass about what sounds like a misunderstanding at best.

Sasha clears his throat.

All three parties fall silent, turning to him automatically for arbitration. “Do I have to make you run an emergency drill if you have enough time for yelling?”

Kuznetsov starts making his case, detailing some shenanigans with a fuel tank, a boat-shed and a core sample that Sasha listens to patiently before he gets the other side of the story from Wilson, who grudgingly admits that neither he nor Latta knew it was a core sample when they licked it, and they shouldn’t have been in the boat in the first place.

“Okay,” Sasha says, doing his very best not to laugh. “Wilson, you and Latts are doing Kuzy’s Wednesday morning shift. Kuzy gets to sleep in, and everyone is happy, yes?” Wilson and Latta nod with visible reluctance, and Kuznetsov salutes him sarcastically, which is pretty much the best outcome Sasha could hope for. “Can I shower now? Can I take my Sunday in peace?”

“Sunday’s never peaceful when you’re having fun,” Kuznetsov mutters, unzipping his parka a little more suggestively than Sasha considers to be strictly necessary.

“Jealousy is a bad look on you,” Sasha tells him, heading back inside.

Nicke is sleeping in, sprawled face-down on his bunk with his skinny ankles hanging off the edge of the mattress. In the summer, he sleeps mostly naked, citing the need for skin to breathe outside of gore-tex and goose down. Sasha appreciates his Swedish insanity, when the nights still dip below zero.

Sasha strips off and climbs in with him, waking him up.

“I’m tired,” he murmurs, nose pressed into the soft skin over Nicke’s biceps, feeling the curve of deceptively heavy muscle shift under him. “Being in charge is hard.”

“Cry me a river,” Nicke groans, turning over. When they’ve settled back into comfortable shape, he starts tracing a pattern over the arm Sasha has thrown across his broad stomach, raising tracks in his greying hair and answering, pleasurable shivers in Sasha’s belly. “I’m due to make a sample trip,” he offers. “End of the month.”

Sasha already knows this; he scheduled it with him. He doesn’t say anything, because after many years he can tell when Nicke is working up to a point.

“You should come,” Nicke says. “Ten days out, it’ll be good for you.”

“Who’d monitor my tags?”

“You know, there’s this kid, I don’t know if you’ve met him—“

“Okay,” Sasha says, laughing. “I’ll bribe Burky. He can hang out with Holts, and Holts can be the adult for a while.”

Nicke snorts indelicately.

Sasha, intrigued, props himself up on an elbow. “What do you know?”

“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” Nicke says, slitting his eyes open. “Are you coming with me, then?”

Sasha waggles his eyebrows. “Am I what?”

Nicke grabs Sasha by the wrist and drags his hand down below the covers. Sasha takes the hint, delighted to find Nicke half-hard already. As usual, it’s the easiest thing in the world to lose himself in the pleased, breathy sigh Nicke lets out when Sasha strokes him just right, and to feel himself responding in kind, pressed in close and warm.

Some things pale with familiarity, but this just keeps getting better. Sasha sometimes wonders what the balance to it ought to be, what hammer-fall of fate awaits them out of sight, around a corner.

If nothing else, it’s just time, just the annual glance they share when they get their options to renew, when their funding has been approved, when they both send their yearly friends home and stay on another season.

Sasha rubs his thumb over the head of Nicke’s cock just the way he likes it, slick and burning-hot, and Nicke doesn’t bother being quiet when he comes.

-

The first night out, Sasha remembers why it is he loves the Arctic so fucking much.

Nicke’s stated field sites are on the high plain of the island, a vast inland plateau ringed by jagged black mountains, tundra stretching out in all directions, one of the last wild places left on Earth.

Once, Sasha got into a screaming fight with an anthropologist at a conference about the breadth of human damage to the planet, over something minute and semantic. Sasha thinks calling the rapid change the consequence of a new geological age triggered by humans underscores the gravity of it, and that there are too many distinct markers to ignore. She’d thought that naming climate change as a geological age undermined the gravity of human intervention. Right now, Sasha can see both, but he lives here, up in this icebound oasis, and sometimes it does him good to remember why he’s fighting for it, even as their very presence is evidence of something strange, a liminal state of forced belonging. They’re not really supposed to be here, but here they are.

“Anthropocene,” Sasha mutters, tasting the air, throwing his hood off and revelling in the pure, clear cold of it, watching Nicke move.

Nicke, striding around, pacing out a spot for the test, pauses. “What?”

“Nothing,” Sasha says. “Remembering a fight I had once.”

“Did you win?” Nicke starts pacing again, while Sasha unpacks the ATV.

“I don’t think either of us did,” he admits. “I don’t think any of us will.”

“Help me set up the tent, then,” Nicke says, unpacking stakes and placing them at corners once he’s found the packed-down site they left last year, moulded into a different shape by the frost. “You can win my affections.”

“I already have them, don’t I?”

Nicke pauses, a hint of his smile lines creasing around his eyes. “An interesting hypothesis.”

“I’ll submit my findings for peer review later,” Sasha promises, grinning.

-

The sun is up the whole time Sasha and Nicke are away.

In that time, it might be easy for them to grate on each other, to find a little patch of roughness between them and grind at it, but it seems as though the open space they have all around them somehow removes the tension of isolation.

Nicke makes dinner and Sasha makes breakfast. Nicke pitches the tent and Sasha packs it away.

Nicke takes Sasha as deep as he can, and Sasha yells with abandon at the feeling of his tongue and lips and throat, and only the distant animals are around to hear them.

Nicke bends Sasha gently over and works him open with his fingers, torturously slow, until Sasha is begging him for more, for anything, and then he fucks him until Sasha is wordless and beyond himself, cold air the only thing keeping him alert.

The last night, Sasha rocks between Nicke’s thighs, and they both finish slowly, in no rush at all. It’s paced at the whim of the glaciers, for them, and there’s no reason yet to change it.

Between it all, Nicke drives them across the plateau, and Sasha takes him to his hides, the new ones and the ones that might have been fruitful last year, and he glances over sometimes to see Nicke smiling silently, binoculars pressed to his face as Sasha shows him where the oxen go to breed.

Nicke’s research requires death, or at least the awareness of the constancy of it, and Sasha’s requires life, or the deep conviction he holds in the possibility of it. There’s no jagged edge between them.

-

The last of August becomes September.

Sasha turns thirty-one, his hair greyer than last year, his face still the same, broad-boned and heavy-jawed, skin tight over his cheekbones where Nicke smooths his fingertips, bearded where Nicke’s nails scratch at his cheeks.

September becomes November, and Nicke turns thirty.

“What if we throw a party?” Burakovsky asks, sidling up to Sasha in the very last of the twilight on the beach, his camera swinging huge and unwieldy off his shoulder. “Would he poison us?”

“That’s a weirdly specific question,” Sasha points out, taking notes quickly before he has to tuck his thinner gloves back inside his thicker ones. “Can anyone bake?”

“I think Wilson can,” Burakovsky replies. “He’s always talking about muffins, so he’s probably the most qualified.”

“I’ll distract him if you set up the rest,” Sasha volunteers, already planning it out.

Sasha is sad to miss what he later learns is chaos in the kitchen, but it’s worth it for Nicke’s look at dinner when he walks in and every single person there yells “Anthrax!” at the top of their lungs and throws a handful of flour at him.

“You’d all die horrible, lingering deaths,” Nicke says, laughing, flour coating his eyelashes and stuck in his eyebrows.

“Happy birthday.” Sasha kisses him on the cheek. “I’m happy you’re here.”

It’s as close to a declaration as he’ll let himself get.

Nicke reaches up and cups his chin, dragging his nails up under Sasha’s jaw. “You’d all be dead by now without me, so it’s just as well,” he says.

“Gross,” Latta declares. “Get a room.”

“Respect your elders,” Sasha replies, “or we won’t share our lube.”

Nicke laughs, and it’s the best sound in the world.

-

December howls in with a vengeance.

Sasha, braced for it, is still shocked at the turn of the weather. It happens every year, but it’s not regular as clockwork. Once, it took until January to reach the right level of apocalyptic cold, but in recent years it’s been happening that the wind arrives earlier, and with it the snow, but the ice doesn’t form nearly as hard and fast as it ought to.

It makes the seas and skies unpredictable, and everyone on the base irritable and restless, all of them too aware that what they’re witnessing isn’t like anything that has happened on a geological scale before.

With the usual disquiet of the darkness settling in, Sasha thinks maybe it’s just the usual nerves at work when Nicke gets a little quieter than normal.

“What’s the matter,” Sasha asks, watching Nicke pick reluctantly at his breakfast.

“Nothing,” Nicke says, pressing his lips together before taking a determined bite of his oatmeal. He turns, if possible, even paler than he usually is, but he swallows. “Indigestion.”

Sasha doesn’t press him, because in the very last days he can go outside, he takes every single chance to do so, getting Holtby and Schmidt to take a snowmobile convoy with him to collect the last of his equipment and to help him shore up anything that needs urgent attention. It’s very much an exercise in battening down the hatches, and Sasha doesn’t pretend it’s anything but. He has responsibility and he has experience, and with the two of them covering him, he organises Orlov and Alzner to take Andre to do the same for his sites on the shore.

Winter is for analysis, for calculations and conferences over the kitchen table and mapping your work. Winter is for endurance; when you can go outside, you do. Otherwise, you learn how many times you can hear the same jokes without going spare, and how long you can stand to eat the same food and breathe the same air. Sasha himself sometimes goes outside in the very worst of the bone-cracking cold just to take as many breaths as he can before the temperature steals the moisture right out of his lungs.

Sasha comes in near-frozen with Holtby on a Tuesday night just as a storm is closing in, trapping Holtby in the module before he can cross the twenty metres to the rangers’ house.

“Have dinner with us. Take my bunk,” Sasha suggests. “I’ll sleep with Nicke.”

“I’ll radio Dima,” Holtby sighs. “Are your sheets clean? You know what, actually… don’t tell me.” He clicks on his radio, but gets nothing but static. He tries their emergency channel, and then gives up. “Did you keep the flags up?”

Just in case this happens, they have a rigged system of quick flags that can be used for status, so Sasha goes to paste the green one in the observation point, so Orlov, Alzner and Schmidt know nobody is missing or dead.

“Where’s Nicky?” Holtby asks, when Sasha comes back to the warm-up room with a bottle of water for him. “Isn’t he usually here making sure the tip of your dick hasn’t frozen off?”

“He’s got tests to run,” Sasha says, stuffing his hands under his armpits. “He’ll show up at dinner.”

Nicke does not show up at dinner.

Holtby sits in his usual spot, and Sasha tries not to worry too much when Nicke fails to show for fifteen minutes, and then half an hour. It’s only when Burky comes jogging in after going out for a few minutes that Sasha thinks something might be awry.

“Sasha,” Andre says, leaning close, “Can I bring Nicke something hot?”

There’s a rule against food outside of the kitchen, for so many reasons, but this is the first time Sasha thinks he’s ever heard of anyone asking to violate it. “What?”

“He wants—"

“What’s the matter with him?” Sasha stands up too quickly, chair toppling over. “I’ll bring him something. Where is he?”

“In his office,” Andre says, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. “He’s still running tests.”

Sasha doesn’t bother excusing himself. He grabs a bowl of the stew they’ve been eating and strides off down the hall, leaving without a second word. Andre tags along, tall and anxious behind him like a Swedish duckling.

Nicke is at his desk in his stupid swivel chair, a digital thermometer sticking out of his ear and his skin the colour of soured milk under the evening striplights.

Sasha feels like his heart might come beating right out of his chest. “Nicke?” he manages, because that’s all he can think, just his name, over and over. “You look like shit.”

“It’s just a cold,” Nicke mumbles, looking at the display. He blinks, as though he’s having trouble focusing. “I think it’s just a cold.”

“What does it say?”

Nicke doesn’t answer.

“Nicklas. What does it say?”

Nicke sighs, and Sasha can see the sweat lingering in his hair, and the sallowness of his skin seems abrupt and terrifying after having only seen him just this morning. “Thirty-nine,” Nicke says quietly, looking up at Sasha as though the effort of speaking is causing him pain.

“What else?” Nicke, again, doesn’t answer. Sasha wants to shake him, but instead he puts the bowl of stew down on the first available surface and kneels down next to him, reaching for Nicke’s hand. When Nicke grips back, Sasha’s heart leaps into his throat. Against Sasha’s palm, Nicke’s skin is clammy, slick with sweat. “Nicke. What do I need to know.”

Nicke draws in a long breath, placing his other hand slowly on his right side, just below his ribs, as though hesitant to touch. “I need to give it— twenty four hours from onset. It might go away.”

Sasha is a doctor, but he is very much not a physician. He’s not even a veterinarian, though he, like everyone here, can do basic field medicine in an emergency. Even he knows that’s unlikely, if it’s what Nicke is avoiding admitting to.

“Does appendicitis go away on its own?”

“It’s happened,” Nicke bites out, “once or twice.”

“Can we evacuate him?” Burakovsky asks.

Sasha starts. He’d forgotten he was there.

“Ask Holtby,” Sasha says, delegating for once in his life. “Do whatever he says.”

“Got it.” Burakovsky leaves, feet clanging down the hall.

In the silence, Sasha can suddenly hear, acutely, the howling wind buffeting the module. No matter how many cracks they fill over the summer, the wind always finds one or two, just enough to make that noise, the low, moaning scream of air encountering resistance.

“I wish he’d taken the stew with him,” Nicke says, before he very calmly leans over and vomits into the trash can under his desk.

-

Sasha would be lying if he said he’s never thought about losing him, but it’s always been a scenario of parting ways, Nicke going back to Gothenburg or Stockholm, or maybe to that fellowship he talks about sometimes in London, and Sasha back to Moscow. Maybe they’d meet at conferences and fuck in hotel rooms for old time’s sake. Maybe Nicke would have a glittering career without Sasha, and remember their time together fondly, as the kind of romance of circumstance people write novels about.

Maybe Sasha himself would do the same, would write him sometimes on his birthday, would acknowledge him in the preface of the book he should be writing, would never tell anyone what they had and what they did to each other, icebound and happy.

He’s never once imagined anything but the most tiny and personal disasters.

He’s never thought about what happens if the doctor is sick.

“All this talk about anthrax and you go down with appendicitis,” he says, propping Nicke up a little better. “It’s kind of a letdown.”

Nicke groans, hair plastered to his head with sweat and hot even from a few inches away. “I could treat anthrax,” Nicke points out, shifting around a bit, then seeming to give up, looking almost too big for the infirmary bed, the dissonance of it being him in there still alien to Sasha.

“Antibiotics?” Sasha asks, knowing what the answer will be.

“Not fast enough,” Nicke confirms, reaching for the water Sasha is holding.

In the last eighteen hours, Nicke has vomited more than he’s kept down, but he keeps drinking it anyway.

The storm outside is still going, and Sasha has no idea what to do. They’re cut off. It’s happened before, and they’ve waited it out until the radios go through again, until their satellite phone will keep and hold a line for more than a few seconds at a time.

Holtby is still trapped in their module, wearing one of Andre’s sweaters and a pair of sweatpants with socks he’s rolled up over them, looking like a large, bearded, authoritative child on a sleepover. “No luck with the storm window,” He says, coming in with his hourly update. “How’re you doing, doc?”

“I’m fine,” Nicke says, shivering violently.

“Uh huh.” Holtby squares his shoulders. “We’re looking at another few days at least, from what I’m seeing on the weather tracker. I’ve gotten through a couple times to Wrangel, but they’re as iced-in as we are. So, we need to know what you need.”

“How is it we never thought of having two doctors?” Sasha demands. “Surely that’s a pretty crucial oversight.”

Holtby shrugs. “Unless you can magically materialise one right now, does it matter?”

“It has to come out," Nicke says, quietly.

Sasha starts, processing the interruption. “What?”

"I’ll do it,” Nicke says, nails digging into Sasha’s wrist where he takes a terrifying grip.

Sasha’s rising anger dies in an instant as he processes what Nicke is implying. It’s not an impossible duplication of himself, that’s for sure. It's something that, somehow, seems even less plausible. 

“I’ll need help,” Nicke says. “And… a mirror.”

“That’s—“ Holtby starts, but Sasha ignores him, sitting back down next to the bed.

“I can do it,” Nicke says. He’s so pale now that Sasha can see all the veins in his heavy eyelids, purple and spidered like spring meltwaters under the skin. His eyes seem very bright, and Sasha knows it’s the fever, but as he pushes Nicke’s sweaty hair off his face and feels the violent heat of him, Sasha thinks he’ll remember it forever, this exact shade of piercing green. “Trust me,” Nicke insists, quiet and still but for the fine tremor Sasha can feel thrumming through him when he rests his hand on the side of Nicke’s long neck. “I’m not just going to wait for it to burst.”

"Nicky," Holtby says, voice very steady, "Are you serious?"

“Tell anyone who’s okay with blood to get in here,” Sasha tells him, not sparing a glance, unwilling to look away from Nicke, even for a second.

Sasha hears him go, still watching Nicke, memorising his face.

-

The first winter Nicke spends at Wrest, Sasha expects him to leave.

Nicke walks around the module like a zombie on his sleep shift sometimes, eyes open and staring mostly at nothing.

It wakes Sasha up, hearing his socked feet echoing on the flooring as goes went past his door. Eventually, Sasha starts getting up with him, walking in silence to the kitchen, enjoying the difference in their heights. Sasha keeps forgetting he is the bigger of them, until they’re shoulder to shoulder in the narrow, rounded spaces. Nicke, solid and curved in a way Sasha isn’t, fits together with him anyway, their legs matching strides, their breath finding rhythm.

Sasha makes him tea, and Nicke takes it silently, holding it, black and sweet, between his palms.

“The darkness is the worst part,” Sasha says, sipping his own. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I’m used to it,” Nicke corrects. “It’s not the darkness. It’s the noise.”

Sasha listens, then, letting the silence between them fade into the multifold soundscape of stressed metal and high wind, and the ever-present groan of strained bolts.

“Have you tried earplugs?” Sasha suggests, feeling helpless, looking at the dark circles under Nicke’s eyes.

“So far the only thing that works is jerking off.”

Sasha chokes on his tea, and Nicke laughs until Sasha can see his molars, kicking him gently under the table.

“Some people bunk together,” Sasha says, carefully neutral.

Nicke looks at him again, taking him in, and gives him the ghost of a smile. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

The rest of the winter passes like that; tea in the kitchen at night. A conversation. A retreat back to bed, and sleep until morning, when Sasha wakes Nicke up, keeping everyone to schedule until the light starts coming back and the life comes back to everyone’s eyes.

The first spring Nicke spends at Wrest, Sasha gets distracted by a discovery of fox kits far off from their preferred habitat, soft and white-tipped and alone, and Sasha bunks down there, watching them, recording them, until suddenly he’s very tired, his eyes heavy, and all over he feels suffused with warmth, a lovely glow of contentment heating his leaden body from the inside.

Laich finds him after he misses his check in, barely conscious, but still somehow speaking, and drags him inside as fast as humanly possible.

All this Sasha learns later, when he comes to with Nicke wrapped around him, skin to skin, utterly nude, covered in as many blankets as could be pressed into service.

“You’re an idiot,” Nicke whispers in his ear. “See if I ever kiss you now.”

“You were going to?” Sasha says, a distant part of him clamouring for attention, too belatedly panicked to be happy he’s alive.

“I was thinking about it,” Nicke says. “Maybe I’m reconsidering.”

Sasha laces his fingers in with Nicke’s, his arm drawn tight against Sasha’s chest.

He’s never really thanked him.

-

“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get home?” Sasha asks, helping Nicke into what he insists is a better position for the surgery, half reclined at what looks like a terrible angle to Sasha. “Eat Swedish food? Sauna? Watch a movie?”

“You’re going to have to put the scalpels where I can reach them,” Nicke says, gesturing at a small table covered in bric-a-brac. “Clear that off, roll it over here.”

Sasha does it, still talking parallel to him, hoping that this time the noise Sasha makes will drown out the other voices, the ones telling him this is futile and reckless and doomed to failure. “I miss dancing,” Sasha admits. “Just that kind of dancing people who can’t dance do in nightclubs. Just bouncing. I liked that.”

“Sasha,” Nicke says, putting a hand on his waist when Sasha comes back within reach. “Shut the fuck up and help me scrub in, okay?”

They lapse into silence for a while as Sasha does his best to create as close to a sterile environment as they can manage, Nicke directing him with admirable precision.

As Sasha is preparing, Holtby comes back with Andre, and a small shaving mirror. Nicke tells them where the gowns and gloves are, and then he falls ominously silent, leaning back against the bed and staring at the ceiling, white lines appearing stark around his mouth and eyes. Sasha watches his jaw clench, but doesn’t dare touch him, not while he looks like he might shatter. Eventually, he breathes out,

“I’m going to eat so many blinis,” Sasha informs him, handing him a cotton swab. “God, so many.”

“Good for you,” Nicke manages, spreading the iodine over his belly, grimacing horribly as he presses into the part where it must hurt the worst. “Here, like this.”

Sasha does it, mimicking Nicke’s movements.

“Nicke,” Sasha says, pitched for him, and not for anyone else. “Are you sure about this?”

“You’ll have to do the local anaesthetic,” Nicke says, pulling his mask up before he indicates to Holtby where he should stand.

Andre stands by the table ready to get anything Nicke needs, and then there’s Sasha, picking up the first syringe.

“Ready?” Sasha asks.

“No,” Nicke admits. “Do it.”

Sasha does exactly as Nicke says.

The first cut of the scalpel, none of them faint, but Andre makes a noise that’s half a sob, just as the blood wells up past the surgical drape. Sasha stanches it and Nicke keeps going, face the colour of parchment. Aside from that, it’s completely silent, just breath and the occasional thump of Nicke’s head as he rests back against the bed, gasping like a marathon runner, the kind racing to warn the Greeks. That, and the storm howling mournfully outside, buffeting them, closing them in.

Every time he pauses, Sasha thinks it’s the end, that he can’t possibly sustain this, but then Nicke says something like “left, Braden,” or “hand me that suture,” and keeps going.

It feels like an eternity before Nicke shudders all over, reaching in with all his fingers and emerging with something bulbous and slick Sasha doesn’t want to look closely at, focused on stopping the blood as Nicke delves into the aperture one last time with perfectly steady hands to finish the job.

He only stops when his hands start to shake, blood-soaked to the wrists over his gloves.

“Can you—" he whispers, gesturing at where Sasha is holding him, waiting. “Finish it, please. You know how?”

Sasha does. If there’s one thing he can do, it’s sutures, and under Nicke’s careful supervision, he gently, slowly, closes the wound.

“Fuck,” Andre says, and it turns out that’s a word Sasha knows in Swedish as well.

“Fuck,” Nicke echoes, and passes out.

-

Sasha only lets himself panic once Nicke has been revived, bandaged and monitored for a few hours, his blood pressure steady and his temperature lowering.

Sasha does it all, remembering the field training he never thought he’d have to use, moving in a haze so profound Sasha thinks he might not remember any of it later; not the feeling of gauze beneath his fingertips or the rise and fall of Nicke’s chest, not even his heart still resolutely beating beneath his ribs.

Eventually, Holtby and Andre eject him.

“He’s asleep,” Holtby says, grabbing Sasha by the shoulders. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even in love with him. Go. If you don’t sleep I’ll make Wilson sit on you.”

“I— what?”

Andre drapes an arm across his back. “Come on,” he says. “I could use a shower.”

Sasha lets himself be steered away. The generators have been running well, and someone has been keeping everything running in Sasha’s absence. It occurs to him, distantly, to be proud, but once the hot water is pounding his shoulders, all that comes out of him is a rising wave of bile, and he barely makes it to the toilet before he loses what feels like everything he’s ever eaten.

It’s pale in comparison to what could have happened, what was so close to happening.

He’d have moved the Earth sideways to save him, and that’s the least frightening part. He might have burned it down if he’d died, and everything Sasha has spent his life working for seems distant and vague in the face of it.

-

The storm eases. Holtby re-establishes comms and relays the news.

Nicke vetoes a medevac, arguing heatedly into the phone in three languages, until Holtby confiscates it and takes over. It’s still too dangerous to send a ship, and Nicke insists he’s out of the woods. “A few hours later and it would have been different,” Nicke allows, “but I’m fine.”

“You’re insane,” Sasha says, helping him change the dressing. “Completely.”

Nicke looks at him, finally just letting him do it. “You have to be, don’t you?”

Sasha lays a hand against his unshaven cheek, remembering the feeling of his skin before, burning up from the inside. “Yes.”

You do. You do have to be crazy to stay year after year after year when every other person except for one goes south again, and leaves you with new faces and new names. You have to be crazy to fall in love with someone just as crazy as you, and hope that they keep staying.

-

A week later Nicke is at breakfast, sitting gingerly in a chair Andre has altered to be more comfortable and eating the plainest breakfast Sasha can get him.

“What’s everybody staring at?” Nicke asks, spoon halfway to his mouth, thigh pressed against Sasha’s under the table.

“I can’t believe you removed your own appendix and didn’t film it. You should have filmed it,” Wilson says. “For science.”

“I was busy,” Nicke says. “Stare at Sasha.”

“I love you,” Sasha blurts, all in a rush.

Nicke bumps his knee into Sasha’s. “I know,” he says. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“Wait, you’ve never—"

Wilson slaps a hand over Latta’s mouth, and Nicke bursts out laughing, one hand pressing into his side where the sutures are, holding him closed.

-

January is the coldest month, the time for hibernation for all of them, really, not just the animals. Every year, Sasha thinks of the first as less a fresh start and more a midpoint, the marker of the year’s turning, and the spring waiting around the curve of the Earth.

This year it very much feels like a breath of clean air, like a real marker of newness at last.

Sasha wakes up curled against Nicke’s back, his hair tickling his nose. “Happy New Year,” he mutters, when Nicke stirs.

“Ugh,” Nicke says, dragging the blankets higher until they’re covering both their heads. “Ten more minutes.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re very lazy?” Sasha kisses the top of his thermal-clad shoulder. “It’s outrageous. You’re a professional. You have responsibilities.”

“Go to hell,” Nicke says. “Which of us fell asleep in a hide and almost died?”

“Me,” Sasha admits, happily. “Which of us refused evacuation after removing their own appendix?”

“Me,” Nicke huffs.

After a minute, Sasha starts combing his hand through Nicke’s hair, pulling the tangles out with exaggerated care. “Are you going to stay?”

“Who else is going to make sure you survive the spring?” He shifts minutely, moving so Sasha has a better angle, a little more room. Sasha can’t see his face, but he can feel it when he says: “Of course I’m staying. I’ve only ever stayed because of you.”

Something in Sasha’s chest clenches viciously, then unravels like tightly-spooled thread. “Idiot,” Sasha says, voice sticking in the back of his throat with the size of it, the sheer weight of the confession. “I’d have gone with you. Anywhere you wanted.”

Nicke grabs his hand, drags it forward so Sasha is wrapped around him, two too-big people in a too-small bed, somehow fitting together. “Here’s fine,” Nicke says simply. “Trust me.”

Sasha does.

-

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: this fic features a scene in which a character removes their own appendix. This is based on a true story which you can read [here](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/), and which has an accompanying photo you should be aware is bloody. 
> 
> Obviously, there will be mentions of blood in the fic, so please be aware ymmv.
> 
> comments make me feel like we're not all stuck on a rock hurtling aimlessly through the void!


End file.
